8 Worst Things The Riddler Has Ever Done

5. Covering Up The Death Of His Crush

The Riddler Hush
Fox

It would be remiss to not include FOX’s Gotham show when looking at some of the more sinister and shocking acts carried out by Edward Nygma.

Throughout Gotham’s five-season run, we saw Cory Michael Smith's Eddie go from a slightly erratic, quirky sort who works alongside the GCPD, to an unhinged, murderous supervillain. And one of the absolute worst things the series’ take on The Riddler did centred around his ‘one true,’ Kristen Kringle.

After Nygma develops a crush on colleague Kringle in the show’s debut season, he ends up seeing first-hand that the apple of his eye has an abusive boyfriend. Confronting this boyfriend, Edward ends up killing him – kind of accidentally, maybe a little bit not so accidentally.

Deciding to eventually come clean to Kristen about what he’s done – largely in the hope of it winning her affection – Nygma ends up choking her to death. Supposedly, Eddie had just meant to keep Kringle silent so that he could fully explain what he’d done. Applying a tad too much force, the love of his life ends up dead in his arms.

While this itself was bad, making things worse was the fact that Edward Nygma did his best cover-up on all of this, as audiences saw a second personality emerging in Edward. That personality, of course, would see Nygma ultimately become The Riddler.

Senior Writer
Senior Writer

Once described as the Swiss Army Knife of WhatCulture, Andrew can usually be found writing, editing, or presenting on a wide range of topics. As a lifelong wrestling fan, horror obsessive, and comic book nerd, he's been covering those topics professionally as far back as 2010. In addition to his current WhatCulture role of Senior Content Producer, Andrew previously spent nearly a decade as Online Editor and Lead Writer for the world's longest-running genre publication, Starburst Magazine, and his work has also been featured on BBC, TechRadar, Tom's Guide, WhatToWatch, Sportkskeeda, and various other outlets, in addition to being a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic. Between his main dayjob, his role as the lead panel host of Wales Comic Con, and his gig as a pre-match host for Wrexham AFC games, Andrew has also carried out a hugely varied amount of interviews, from the likes of Robert Englund, Kane Hodder, Adrienne Barbeau, Rob Zombie, Katharine Isabelle, Leigh Whannell, Bruce Campbell, and Tony Todd, to Kevin Smith, Ron Perlman, Elijah Wood, Giancarlo Esposito, Simon Pegg, Charlie Cox, the Russo Brothers, and Brian Blessed, to Kevin Conroy, Paul Dini, Tara Strong, Will Friedle, Burt Ward, Andrea Romano, Frank Miller, and Rob Liefeld, to Bret Hart, Sting, Mick Foley, Ricky Starks, Jamie Hayer, Britt Baker, Eric Bischoff, and William Regal, to Mickey Thomas, Joey Jones, Phil Parkinson, Brian Flynn, Denis Smith, Gary Bennett, Karl Connolly, and Bryan Robson - and that's just the tip of an ever-expanding iceberg.